Category: Short stories

Short Story Expert at Festival of Chichester Event

Phew!  It’s all over again for another year.  It is nerve-wracking sitting in front of a room full of people, advising them on how to write a good short story, where to send it, how to get it noticed in writing competitions, etc.  And knowing that everyone there has paid good money to listen to me and my fellow writer, Patricia Feinberg Stoner.  But if the feedback comments are anything to go by – perhaps we were only sent the nice ones? – we did well, and people appreciated what we had to say.

Tonight, I heard some lovely news from one of the writers from the Bognor Regis Write Club.  She gave me a big hug and a thank you as one of her stories has been accepted by Yours! Magazine  and will appear in the 25th July edition.  Well done, Marion!

I have spent the afternoon with fellow writers:  Patricia (as above), Angela Petch and Rosemary Noble, as we judged short stories to go into a Christmas book: A Sussex Feast At Christmas, due to be published in October.  We have chosen some excellent stories but had to be quite selective.  Some of the rejected stories deserve a second home – I hope their authors try again somewhere else and have more success than they did with us.

Chichester Ghost Tour

Chichester Ghost Tour

 

      

York and Edinburgh’s Ghost Walks are famous and an essential part of many people’s weekend visits to these cities.  But where is Chichester’s?  With its Roman history and beautiful old pubs that allegedly used to be   part of a smugglers’ network, where are our ghost stories?

When my fellow authors and I looked into it, there just weren’t enough legends to make a truly entertaining walk.  So, controversially, we made a few up to pad out the existing ones.  Well, ghosts aren’t real anyway, are they?

The “Chichester Ghost Tour” was officially launched as part of Chichester Festival  in 2017 from Hennings Wine Shop.   It was repeated several times during 2017 and  a 2nd edition appeared in 2018, with new ghosts and a new tour, again as part of the Festival of Chichester.

The book itself is a self-guided, tongue-in-cheek, optional pub crawl, version of the tour, with 10 ghost stories based in Chichester and written by local authors in the second half of the book, and already available on Amazon and Kindle. http://amzn.eu/g5nOyKP 

The book has been produced in collaboration with Bognor Regis Write Club and CHINDI (Celebrating and Helping Independent Authors), and compiled and edited by me.

As the back cover of the book says:

“Every city should have a ghost tour.   No long weekend visit to a British city is complete without a visit to a traditional pub and a wander around the city centre.  So Chichester deserves to have all three combined.  And here you have it!  A guide to follow on your own or with your friends which will take you on an (optional) pub crawl as well as pointing out the quirkier bits of our beloved town.  To be honest, we expected more ghost stories associated with the place than we could actually find.  But not to worry, using the full resources of CHINDI and Bognor Regis Write Club, we have managed to pull together enough tales to entertain you for a few hours, while you stroll around, gawping and pointing.   Enjoy and remember to drink responsibly.  Try not to have nightmares, unless you want to, in which case eat cheese for supper and read this book at bedtime.”

If you would like to know more, please email me at bognorwriters@gmail.com.